Varsity recruiting season is in full swing. In recent weeks, high school athletes have been shadowing varsity athletes across campuses nationwide. In this Q&A, three Ivy League coaches provide their perspectives on official recruiting visits and offer a few tips to prospective student-athletes.
Kathy Delaney-Smith has coached the Harvard women’s basketball team for 31 seasons, accumulating 11 Ivy League titles. Jim Henry took the reins of the Yale women’s swimming and diving team last season after leading the University of Texas to three Big 12 titles as an associate head coach. Mike Way has coached the Crimson’s men’s and women’s squash programs to multiple individual and team titles during his three seasons in Cambridge.
How do you decide which potential recruits to invite to a recruiting weekend?
Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, Harvard Women’s Basketball: There’s a million things [we consider]. Obviously, the basketball comes first. You find the players you like and the positions you need. Then you collect transcripts all year long—sophomore year, junior year. Then you go watch them play in tournaments, and talk to their high school coach, their AAU coach, their parents and them.You find out if there’s mutual interest, and then sometimes there’s a home visit, sometimes not. We offer campus visits to anyone who fits our needs and is mutually interested in us.
Coach Jim Henry, Yale Women’s Swimming and Diving: You want to look at three different areas. You want to look at athletic potential, you want to look at academic potential and success, and then you want to look at character… It’s not always about where their times are now. I know that in swimming, it’s very easy to look at a piece of paper and a ranking of where someone is currently. We want to look for who is going to be in that ranking in the future… And this is not an easy process, but it’s also predicting who you feel is motivated to do the work in the academic setting like Yale to get better. Those are tough questions to answer, and a lot of it is on a hunch, and a lot of it is on background work.
We probably start with 300 people in the class, and that’s probably cut down to about 150 because of their academics. From those 150, that’s probably chopped down to 75 because of where their times are or what range of swimmer they might be. So of those 75 which we start with on July 1 [the first day swimming and diving coaches can call rising high school senior recruits], we try to figure which 18 could come to campus in September so that they could decide in October.
Coach Mike Way, Squash: For us, we have to troll around the world. We’re pulling in kids from Egypt, Europe. We’ve got a couple kids coming from the U.K., from France, from India. So we literally have to do our homework. The second point is that [we need to make sure] these international kids who have the academics aware that they can come and play college squash over here. Some of them, they may be very bright and have good transcripts, but they’ve never even heard of the SAT. So sometimes that’s a bit of a roadblock.
What are your greatest concerns leading up to and during a recruiting weekend?
Delaney-Smith: There’s all kinds of very formal stuff that other schools do and maybe a lot of the Harvard teams do. They’ll want to impress them with an academic person and a dean and an athletic director—the whole host of people. While I think that has some value, I think that the best value for us, our sport and our philosophy is [the recruits] get a feel and knowledge for the people on our team and a feel and knowledge for the student body at Harvard. I think trying to impress them with professors and stuff like that is silly. The most important thing we’re concerned about is that [the recruits] know what our team is like here, what the student body is like here, and what the student life is like here. That’s our hope.
Henry: My greatest concern is that the visiting recruits can get a true picture of what our team is like in a short window of time… More than anything, I want to make sure they’re taken care of and that they have the opportunity to learn what a true day in the life of a student-athlete at Yale is. I’m always concerned about safety; I’m also always concerned about following the rules. We have moved to a dry policy… I’ve always talked about it, but this is the first year we’ve actually implemented a rule, and it went incredibly well. It was incredibly well-received. I don’t believe that [drinking] should be the deciding factor of why [a recruit] should decide to go to a school. It’s on college campuses; it’s part of our society, but it’s not something that I want them to make their decision based off of.
Way: The biggest concern when they’re on campus is just making sure that they have a good time but it doesn’t get carried away. We’ve just got to make sure that they’re safe. And if they’re coming from different cultures, the players on the team are aware of that and respectful of whatever their background is, vis a vis a normal undergraduate’s life on the weekend.
[Another] concern with every coach is that with the whole recruiting thing, sometimes these kids can make a quick decision based on a small incident. Harvard should always be up there for any smart kid who wants to play sport in America, how could Harvard not be on their radar. The kid wants to like the players, he wants to like the coach, he wants to feel like he can fit in. And apart from that, we just pray it doesn’t rain all weekend (laughs).
What do you think is the most important thing for a recruit to know going into an official visit?
Delaney-Smith: I always like them to know how they fit into our team—what strengths they have that we liked about them. I’d say we have a reputation for being pretty honest recruiters. I always say to everybody, ‘If Harvard isn’t the right match for you, I’d love to see you in the Ivy League.’ It’s a great league to compete in. I like communication and honesty. Unfortunately, it sometimes fails; that’s the piece [of recruiting] that I don’t care for. I don’t have to sell Harvard, I don’t have to sell my program. It’s obvious that it’s a great opportunity for someone.
Henry: Recruiting trips can be one of two things: they can be reality or they can be a show. And what I try to tell [recruits] is that what they’re getting is nothing special. They’re going to the dining halls that they would go to eat in. They are staying in the residential houses that they would stay in next year, they’re going to the classes that they would go to next year… The reality is that they are seeing what the team is really like…
More than anything [recruits] have to ask questions, and they have to get the information that they need. Because it is vital that not only do they listen to the information and see the information, they have to feel what’s really going on, and they have to use their senses so that they’re collecting enough information to make a great decision.
Way: The most important thing is that they have a good interview. So from that perspective, again, we have to do a little work with the student-athlete because if they are obsessive about their sport, they’re not what Harvard is looking for. You’re probably aware of the classic question that is known as “the broken leg question.” The student-athlete needs not only to be able to answer the questions not just eloquently and articulately but [also] to be able to talk about their sport in the broader sense of their experiences. How did they balance sports and studying, and what did they learn from their travels outside the realm of competing?
What are your interactions with recruits during their visit?
Delaney-Smith: I will have a breakfast with [all the visiting recruits] to welcome them and talk a little bit about what their itinerary is and what their interview with admissions is like. And in our sport—this is not true in all sports but it our sport—the parents always come. So we have to host families as well usually.
I try to meet with each [recruit] individually to talk about them and how they’d fit it. For them, it’s important that they play with our team to get a feel and a sense. Coaches are not there, so I am not part of that. And then we’ll take the parents out to dinner.
I evaluate them insofar as how they fit in with my team, what my team felt about them, [and] how disciplined or not disciplined were they. There have been a number of recruits who came here, and we lost them. They went partying and drinking, and they’d come off my list.
Henry: It’s extremely important that I spend some one-on-one time with [the recruits] to make sure they know where they fit within the plan as far as moving forward. I don’t want them to think that there is not a plan for them. I go into detail about where the program is going, why we do what we do, how we train, what I’m looking for. And they ask their personal questions, because all of them have different questions—some of them it’s about swimming, some of them it’s about Yale, some of them is about the process. So I set up one-on-one meetings with them to make sure that those questions are taken care of.
But the other thing I do after they go home is that I make sure to follow up with my team to find out whether or not it’s a good fit for us. Because I trust my team and that they know what type of student is going to be successful at Yale—and it is “student,” and I want to make sure they have that focus first.
Way: When they come on campus, we [coaches] sit down with each of them for at least an hour, and we just talk about them as people. We don’t just ask the questions; we do a practice admissions interview. We get them to talk about themselves. Because, obviously, the interview is not for a job; it’s about who are they. Are they a fit on the team, and, as importantly, are they a fit at Harvard?